About

I’m a traveler and an observer. I was (almost) born on the road, I grew up in different hemispheres, and can’t point my finger on a single mother tongue (nor on a single home country).

I grew up with stories about faraway places I partly yet need to visit, pictures of Serengeti plains, scorched deserts, tales of endless boat trips through the Suez canal, African nights and wilderness. And most importantly about local life, people, hardship and injustice.

I have been lucky enough to gain an early perspective on our world’s width and diversity. I was traveling back and forth across the Atlantic ocean and over the equator since I was a child. Once a year, in the autumn, my mother, brothers and I would leave the approaching Italian winter to join the approaching Argentinian summer. It lasted a handful of years, in which my seasons skipped winter at its darkest, and the sun would travel sometimes on my south, sometimes on my north.
I was born from an English speaking Italian woman who spent her youth in East Africa, and from a French speaking Italian man who instead spent his youth in North Africa. That should make me sort of Italian myself (at least that’s what my passport says; I recently found out here that some call it the “passport country”). I though speak English, think in English, dream in English, work in English, write in English, and I apparently had already uttered English words when I blurted out my first Italian ones. I didn’t manage to get much French until later, though, to much of my father’s disappointment.

Though it was born on travel, this is not what is commonly understood as a travel blog. Through travel we discover the world, we form impressions about places, habits, people and facts. Travel allows us to penetrate the substance of the reality portrayed in reports and accounts, in the social and conventional media, and to understand the world and ourselves at deeper levels. In this sense, traveling is also experiencing mundane facts from an even slightly unusual perspective, without leaving our armchair. This blog is about that experience, be it born on the road or not.
A unique perspective on the world does not exist. Our perception is filtered by the sum of our experiences, our culture, our ideas: the same experiences are different for different people. We can only experience the world by being immersed in the reality we want to understand; still our understanding will be a particular perspective.
I will try to convey in words or images (captured on camera or mobile, depending on what is handy) what the world gives me, tells me, and how it changes me: my perspective on things.
Don’t forget to add your views and perspectives to mine.

I left Italy for good in 2012 to spend 5 years of my life in Sweden, till 2017. I then defended a PhD in economics at the University of Gothenburg. This makes me an economist (of sorts). I work where the boundaries between economics, sociology, and psychology get a bit fuzzy. That’s where things get interesting and fun. I study how people give structure and meaning to the world around them, and to their relationships with others and with the world. My work focuses on inequality, social identity, social conflict and discrimination.

I am currently living in Germany.
I continue researching what I believe are the most important hurdles of our contemporary societies at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance in the beautiful city of Munich.
Here’s a link to my professional website.